It’s 1st of August, it’s time to say goodbye to Ouaga; we have left our house owner with his house, our employees without our employment and our friends ’n’ colleagues without us.
Nevertheless we start our trip back to Laufenburg. Somehow we already started the evening before no longer being coal shippers in the coal mine any more. We converted into the odd tourist: together with 2 fellow travellers we met the same day, Doris’n’Urs on their way from Swizzy- to Ozzyland, we went to the only must see place in Ouage: L’eau vive – the living water, a kind of a religious oriented restaurant combined with a spiritual beer garden, where nuns and their staff take some responsibility in chanting the Ave Maria at 10pm – of course the active participation of all guest eaters is much appreciated.
The next morning – today– we leave highly enchanted to Fada N’Gourma, then on to Tanguieta in Benin. So really our trip has started.
Some excerpts – more u’ll find in our newsletter – if not yet on the distribution list, subscribe on the right side of this page:
The day before, the car had to be loaded – with some useful and all kind of useless stuff, on 1st of August, the tour really starts, as usual in Ouaga accompanied by a few motorcycles surrounding the car.
A last meal in Burkina at the 11th December Hotel in Fada N’Gourma : rice with peanuts in sauce, then we go on to the Benin border. A few stamps and we’re in.
We move on to Pendjari National Park to see some animals: socialising lions preparing for real things, a hungry lion and its breakfast and of course some elephants hanging around under the trees munching some grass.
It’s evening in the National Park. Time to celebrate with a nice bottle filled with rotten grapes and a beautiful dinner. The right pic shows an appetizing dead guinea fowl on our plate, just minutes before getting eaten and a few hours before creating stomach problems.
Next we reach Natitingou. Ages ago, we shipped some Nati coal for our Mother of all Companies.
Natitingou CBD still looks the same – more or less: definitely they added some cellphone companies along the High Road and some of these all present plastic bags on the pavement.
Of course we had to see our former house. We found it, we could even buy it. It still looks almost the same, but by now inhabited and decaying, losing its paint on the walls and the iron sheets on the roof.
We moved on to the Betamaribe tribe west of Natitingou and to Boukoumbé, their capital. We’ll tell u a little more about their specialities in the newsletter.
After all these adventures we moved on, left our former coalmine Natitingou for Dassa in Central Benin. Unfortunately we had to take the road. Some explanations on the rather exceptional conditions of roads in Benin again in the next newsletter.
In Dassa we visited some of the voodoo master’s ceremonial places and finally went on to Abomey. More about the visit to the former kings in the next blog.
If u’r curious about certain issues or need more explanation about certain realities not easily understandable, kindly read our next newsletter. U’ll get it all, promised.
